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Tony O'Malley

This exhibition is a major retrospective of the work of the distinguished Irish artist Tony O’Malley, who died in 2003. O’Malley was one of the major figures in Irish contemporary art and this exhibition is a survey of his life’s work. Nature and history form the basic themes in O’Malley’s highly distinctive paintings. Working intuitively over 40 years, he recorded the moods, movement and bird song of the countryside, usually of Ireland but also of the warmer, more exotic islands where he spent the winter. His paintings, on everything from scraps of recycled paper and canvas to the discarded hoops of an old Guinness barrel, also celebrate the medieval and Gaelic associations of such places as Callan, Jerpoint, and Kells, as well as his ancestral roots in Clare Island on the west coast of Co Mayo. Tony O’Malley is now recognised as one of the leading Irish painters of his time. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Glen Dimplex Award for a Sustained Contribution to the Visual Arts in Ireland, while a year later his work formed the central, visual focus for the Festival of Irish Culture, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, USA.

This exhibition is curated by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, curator and critic.

A major publication, with essays by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Catherine Marshall, Senior Curator: Head of Collections, IMMA, accompanies the exhibition.

The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES and H & K International.